Firstly, thanks for the kindness with a novice, dear Jukka
About the Errata, forgive me: it's already exists an Errata relative to the
revision 1999-01-11 -- that section 5.6.2 deals with the mistake about the
applying of the property "white-space".
Actually, there is no official W3C statement about <NOBR>. However, after to
read the messages related to this in the mailing lists, one would conclude
that there is, at least, a para-official statement...
The central trouble in the exclusion of the <NOBR> tag from the HTML
specification is that the functionality of this tag satisfies
characteristicals structural impositions, rather than authors'
presentational choices. Perceive that difficultly a content within a <NOBR>
would be, suddently, removed from there -- if a certain content was inserted
within a <NOBR> tag, it's because such content, effectively, require no
wrapping. Consequently, the behavior of the <NOBR> is eminetly structural
( HTML ), it is not, merely, "formatational" ( CCS ). Further, there's a
strong inconvenience in the CSS propertie "white-space": "conforming user
agents" may ignore its settings.
Both minus character, principally, and &nbsp; entity solve nothing. The
&nbsp; entity is specially unsuitable in a scenery of justified alignment,
where it usually leads to the appearance of large empty areas in the
inter-words regions ( because the space between the words united through the
&nbsp; entity isn't stretchable, extra blank space between the remaining
words must to be created to accomplish the justification ). Finally, it's a
bit curious the existence of the &shy; entity -- that functionality is
extremely specific, and that applying is even rarely ( it would be employed,
for exemple, to indicate to the User Agent the possibility of an aesthetic
line break within a extensive word -- a URL would be such word ) -- , in
face of the inexistence of the <NOBR> tag, that is evidently more usefull.